Whatever you need, you can get it online. That can make shopping for health products a little bit, shall we say, sketchy. “The people selling certain products to you don’t care about your health and just want money. With greed comes a lot of fraud,” says Josephine Dlugopolski-Gach, assistant professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at Loyola University Health System. While you have to be careful with whatever you buy, these four products below can run you into a lot of trouble—and harm:

Certain prescription medications

If a site will let you buy meds without a prescription, that’s a big red flag—especially for certain medications. Listen to this warning from the Drug Enforcement Administration: “Buying online could mean doing time.” Even if you have good intentions, you can’t legally buy “controlled substances” online like Xanax or Ambien without an Rx. And prescriptions from cyber docs won’t cut it, says the DEA. The law is different depending on your state, but most require you to see a doctor you have a relationship with in person. In addition to that, buying from a bad site could leave you with medication that’s fake or contains dangerous ingredients. For example, the FDA purchased the flu-stopping medication Tamiflu online in order to test it. They found it wasn’t Tamiflu at all, but a combination of talc and acetaminophen.

It’s perfectly fine to buy prescription medication from a state-licensed US-based online pharmacy; these sites often can help you save money. To know if they’re legit, Dr. Dlugopolski-Gach suggests making sure they have an actual phone number, have a licensed pharmacist on staff, and require an Rx to fill your order. You can check the legitimacy of the site at the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy. And use common sense. “If the deal sounds too good to be true, you’re probably not going to get the right medication,” she says.

Weight loss supplements

You never know what you’re going to get when you buy a weight loss supplement online. The FDA points out that in their testing, they’ve discovered supplements—even herbals—were tainted with hidden and unsafe ingredients. Many are also not FDA-approved, meaning their claims haven’t been checked out and aren’t regulated. (It’s on the individual companies to tell the truth. They don’t always do that.) “A lot of times, these weight loss pills are just stimulants. They contain a lot of caffeine, which is not safe, especially if you have a cardiac condition,” says Dr. Dlugopolski-Gach. “I’ve seen people go into the ER on the verge of a heart attack.” While building long-term healthy habits is often the best way to keep weight off, if you want to check out something that promises to help you lose weight or rev your metabolism, “tell your doctor what you’re interested in before you buy it, even if it’s marketed as natural,” she adds.

Breast milk

You hear “breast is best”—but it’s not if it comes from an online source, suggests an editorial in The BMJ. The problem is, breast milk online is an unregulated industry, so it can be contaminated with viruses (like hepatitis or HIV), bacteria (if not stored or shipped properly) alcohol, prescription medication, and illegal drugs, notes Dr. Dlugopolski-Gach. What’s more, in a new study in the journal Pediatrics, researchers tested 102 samples and found 10% were topped off with cow’s milk, which can cause an allergic reaction. It’s understandable that people might want to buy breast milk–aka “liquid gold”–if they can’t produce their own due to cancer treatment or other reasons. Or that other women would want to donate or sell their milk if they produce more than enough. However, the temptation to make more money by adding cow’s milk might be too much for some online sellers. Organizations like Eats on Feets and Only the Breast (which broker such sales) do recommend pasteurizing all milk and screening donors for HIV and other diseases (among other safety suggestions), but many people don’t follow the guidelines, according to a CNN report. “If you can breastfeed that’s wonderful, but if you can’t, formula is the next best thing,” says Dr. Dlugopolski-Gach. “It’s not worth risking going to an online source and getting breast milk from a stranger.” If you do want to donate milk, there are nonprofit milk banks that collect, test, pasteurize, and store human milk for infants, mostly at-risk neonates in hospitals; go to the Human Milk Banking Association of North America for more information.

Hormone products

If you are approaching menopause, you might be tempted to buy hormone replacement medications, creams, or herbs online. “Some women want a quick fix to get their sex drive or chutzpah back,” explains Diana Bitner, MD, an ob/gyn at Spectrum Health Medical Group in Grand Rapids, MI. “I have patients who have bought testosterone pellets on their own. They end up taking so much of the hormone they have really bad side effects, like hair growth, voices deepening, and rage issues,” she explains. Many of these products are not effective, safe, and contain variable amounts of active ingredients.

Same goes for buying soy. “Women will buy a ton of this online and say it doesn’t make them feel better, so they buy more and more,” Dr. Bitner explains. Only about 30% of women’s bodies can actually utilize soy to lessen menopause symptoms, so you may be wasting your money. For any hormone treatment, even if it’s labeled “natural” you need a doctor’s guidance; she can ensure you get the right hormones in the right amount every time that work.

A Florida Teen Impersonated a Doctor for a Whole Month

"I am really getting old because these young doctors look younger every year," one physician thought

A teenager in Florida managed to fool an entire medical center into thinking he was a doctor for a whole month before he was found out.

The teen wore a white coat that read “Anesthesiology” on the back as he walked through the corridors of St. Mary’s Medical Center in Palm Beach, KCTV 5 News reports.

“He presented himself with a patient of our practice and introduced himself as Dr. Robinson,” Dr. Sebastian Kent said. “The first thing I thought was, ‘I am really getting old because these young doctors look younger every year.'”

The teen was discovered after being caught in an examination room with a patient while wearing a mask and a stethoscope.

His mother told police he had an undisclosed illness and had not been taking his medication. Both police and the hospital decided not file charges.

Child Medication Errors Occur Every 8 Minutes, Study Says

According to a study in the journal Pediatrics

Every eight minutes, a child experiences a medication error like taking the wrong drug or consuming too much, according to a new study published on Monday.

Researchers looked at out-of-hospital medication errors in the National Poison Database System from 2002 to 2012 and found that more 200,000 mishaps are reported to U.S. poison control centers every year, noted the study in the journal Pediatrics. In about 30% of those cases, the child is under age 6.

Nearly 82% of medication errors were from liquid medicine, followed by tablets and capsules at 14.9%, the researchers said. They added that errors increased as kids’ ages decreased, and that 27% of the mistakes occurred when a child was accidentally given the same medication too soon.

Twenty-five of the children died as a result of the errors during the 11-year study period, but overall the vast majority of the cases did not require treatment.

The study authors argue that medication errors are a significant public-health problem that needs more attention. One way to cut down, they suggest, is by making drug packaging and their labels more clear when it comes to directions and dosing.

High blood pressure affects one in three adults in the United States. It can have a major impact on your health, of course; as a financial planner, I’m also conscious of the negative consequences it can have for your finances, too.

The challenge with high blood pressure is that it does not cause a person to feel ill. With health care costing as much as it does, it is easy to forgo treatment for an illness that doesn’t cause many symptoms. So many people leave their high blood pressure untreated.

The end result of this inaction: greater illness and higher health care costs down the road. Untreated high blood pressure leads to heart disease, strokes, or heart and kidney failure. Not treating high blood pressure is a perfect example of being penny-wise and dollar-foolish.

So given the importance of treating high blood pressure, what can people do to control the current cost of their illness? A couple of actions can go a long way.

Improve Your Lifestyle

An unhealthy lifestyle is the most common way people develop high blood pressure in the first place. Weight loss, regular exercise, salt reduction, and limiting alcohol are cheap ways to potentially eliminate the disease. These aren’t easy changes at first, but by developing a new lifestyle as a habit, the new behavior gets easier with time.

A healthy diet is also important, but a diet heavy in vegetables, fruit, and unprocessed food can cost a lot and require time-consuming amounts of cooking. One way to mitigate this cost is to become an “Iron Chef”: work with the raw material at hand. Go with what’s on sale in the grocery aisle, or even better, hit the farmer’s market. Spend a couple of hours on days off to cook enough to last most of the week.

Manage Your Medicine

Doctors choose medication to treat high blood pressure based on a number of factors. Concurrent illness, other medication, demographics, and potential side effects all play a role. The good news is that most medication used to treat high blood pressure comes in generic form, and the generics work just fine. Generics are cheap. In fact, some pharmacies will provide generic medication for high blood pressure for free! Your doctor will know if these opportunities are available in your area; it’s up to you to ask about the options.

The most important part of medication management is consistency. Medication taken regularly and about the same time everyday results in better blood pressure control. Ideally, people brush their teeth every day, so why not put your medication by the toothbrush and make it part of the routine?

If your blood pressure is too high, the doctor will see you every couple of weeks or so until it is in a good range. If blood pressure is well controlled with lifestyle and medication, doctor visits are reduced to once or twice a year, depending on other health issues. Better control results in fewer doctor visits, which reduces the cost of care.

High blood pressure doesn’t have to be costly. By being forward-thinking about it, you can greatly improve the quality and length of your life — and lower your expenses along the way.

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Carolyn McClanahan is a physician, financial planner, and founder of Life Planning Partners. In addition to running her financial planning practice, she educates financial planners, health care professionals, and the public on the intersections of health and personal finance.

I love your work. Who doesn’t? Clearly nobody, since you just won a record-obliterating sixth Tony for your performance as Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill. Congratulations. That’s an incredible feat.

And don’t get me wrong, I love that you thanked your parents before anyone, the folks who got you your start in the theater. “I want to thank my mom and dad up in heaven,” you said in that seriously kick-ass red-and-white gown, “for disobeying the doctors’ orders and not medicating the hyperactive girl and finding out what she was into instead and pushing her into the theater.”

I have kids too. Should they happen to ever achieve a modicum of success, I’d like to think they might thank me one day. Not publicly from a podium or anything, but maybe just from their desk, or whatever place of work they happen to land upon. Here’s the thing, though: I really want them to have jobs. Unlike your family, of whom you once joked that if you were “tone-deaf they would have kicked me out,” I’m not musical. Unlike you, my kids do not have five aunts in a professional gospel-singing group. (My brothers did have a band. If memory serves, my mother called them the Unlistenables.)

But here’s the thing: one of my kids doesn’t learn very well without the meds. We’ve tried the theater, sports, music, wearing him out, getting him more sleep, meditation, diet, being super-disciplinarian, being not too disciplinarian, art, bribery and shouting. We even tried chewing gum for a while. Oh, man, that stuff is hard to remove. We tried a lot of techniques, some of them more seriously than others, because we are human and have jobs and other children. But the thing that worked best, that enabled him to learn to read and stopped him from getting into trouble at school, was medicine.

Since completing school and getting a job are pretty tightly linked, our options are limited. Since employment and having a family, or a home or a healthy mental attitude, have also been linked, the parent of a child who has trouble learning can begin to get very anxious. Nobody, as I’ve said before, is thrilled to medicate their child. It’s not what anybody considers a huge parental triumph. We have no trophy cabinet for the expired bottles of methylphenidate. But if you don’t have a child whose talents are as prodigious and obvious as yours, it can be tough to figure out what’s best for them. So you’re left with trying to avoid what’s worst; and clearly not being able to learn is pretty high on that list.

I’m sure that you were not personally judging me and other concerned parents when you thanked your parents for not putting you on Ritalin. I’m sure you weren’t trying to prescribe from the podium. And obviously, you have thrived, against some serious odds. But damn it, you’re not making it any easier to live with our hard decisions. There’s anxiety and then there’s Audra-induced anxiety, which is more dramatic and accomplished than the regular sort. I’m equally sure your parents also drove you to rehearsal a lot, or ran lines with you, or calmed you down if you had stage fright, or told you not to chew your nails. You couldn’t have mentioned that instead?

The chances of anybody winning six Tonys are extremely slender (again, bravo). If by giving my child medication, I have reduced his chances of getting that gong even further, so be it. He may not be Audra-level awesome, but he’s going to get through school. I’m O.K. with that.

This Graphic of Counterfeit, Poison-Laced Pills Is Horrifying

Rat poison, wall paint, antifreeze, paint thinner and a few other ingredients that have slipped into the $75 billion a year market for counterfeit pills

Today the world celebrates Anti-Counterfeiting Day, and by world, we mean a little-known coalition of regulators and lawyers celebrating their quiet battle against counterfeit drug makers.

Here’s a reason for the non-observant to join the festivities: Some $75 billion worth of counterfeit drugs hit the global market each year. These pills often have brand names etched on the outside and chemical imbalances on the inside that are at best, ineffective, and at worst, toxic.

Just how toxic? The Partnership for Safe Medicines, a not-for-profit association of pharmaceutical organizations, has a graphic just in time for the holidays. It shows the full sweep of contaminants that heath officials have discovered in fake pills over the years.

Uranium, of course, is a worst case scenario. Actual contamination rates are hard to measure in an industry that dodges scrutiny for a living. A rough survey by the World Health Organization found that 73% of counterfeit medications contained either the wrong ingredient, the wrong dosage, or no active ingredient, while 8% were laced with impurities and contaminants. Only 15% contained the right dose and the right ingredient. Some sobering figures to contemplate on World Anti—Counterfeit Day, or any day an unaccredited website offers pills at rock-bottom prices.

Many students use ADHD drugs for academic performance, and they don't think it's cheating

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About one in five students at an Ivy League college said they’ve used a prescription ADHD drug while studying, and a third of the college students did not think that qualified as cheating, according to new research.

ADHD medications, like adderall or ritalin, are commonly misused among people without a diagnosis as a way to perform and concentrate better. A 2011 paper from the College Board reported that though available numbers are small, students do obtain and use ADHD drugs and learning disorder diagnoses to gain an academic advantage, the New York Timesreports. Of course, there are people with legitimate disorders, but the new study focused on students without ADHD.

The researchers, who will present their findings at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting this weekend, interviewed 616 students at a “highly selective college” (the researchers did not say which), and found that 18% used the drugs for academic reasons, and 24% had done so eight or more times. College juniors were the most likely to abuse the medication, and students who played sports or were involved in Greek life were also the most common abusers. Since the researchers excluded anyone with an ADHD diagnosis, all the students were therefore using the drugs illegally. The researchers did not ask about the source of the medications, but told TIME in an email that they are almost always from other students.

When asked whether this type of behavior classified as cheating, a third of the students said it did not, 41% said it was cheating, and 25% said they were not sure. People who used ADHD meds were also more likely to think it was a common phenomenon on campus.

More and more people are being diagnosed with ADHD, including adults. The number of adults taking ADHD drugs rose by over 50% between 2008 and 2012, according to a report. One of the hard parts about screening for the disorder is that doctors need to determine who has a legitimate disorder and who is looking for a performance fix. The researchers say their study raises those serious questions for providers: “To the extent that some high school and college students have reported feigning ADHD symptoms to obtain stimulant medication, should physicians become more cautious or conservative when newly diagnosing ADHD in teens?” study author Dr. Andrew Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Steven & Alexandra Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York, said in a statement.

The findings will be presented Saturday, May 3, at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Vancouver.

Study: Powerful Painkillers Increasingly Prescribed In ERs

Prescriptions for narcotic painkillers, or opiates, in emergency departments rose 49 percent between 2001 and 2010, according to a new study. The finding raises concerns over the risks of addiction and misuse

Emergency departments in America are increasingly prescribing strong painkilling drugs like Oxycontin and Vicodin amid rising use of the medications nationally.

Prescriptions for narcotic painkillers, or opiates, in emergency departments rose 49 percent between 2001 and 2010, according to a study published in this month’s issue of Academic Emergency Medicine.

Doctors have increasingly prescribed the potent painkillers in part because of a movement to improve pain management, according to CBS. But doctors are also increasingly incentivized to please patients—some hospitals offer pay incentives linked to patient satisfaction–and may prescribe the medication to patients who ask for it.

The rising use of narcotic painkillers has prompted concerns over the risks of addiction and misuse. Roughly 15,000 Americans die annually from overdosing, and some 12 million people abuse the medication, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Elders’ Medications Often Cancel Each Other Out

In some instances can worse another disease

About 75% of older Americans suffer from multiple chronic diseases like heart disease and dementia, but 1 in 5 of them are taking a combination of drugs that interfering with or worsen one of their ailments.

New research published in the journal PLOS ONE looked at 5,815 community-living adults between 2007 and 2009, andfound that 22.6% of older people are taking a medication that can make a coexisting illness worse. “Many physicians are aware of these concerns but there isn’t much information available on what to do about it,” study author David Lee, an assistant professor in the Oregon State University/Oregon Health & Science University College of Pharmacy said in a statement.

Some chronic diseases known to have competing therapies include diabetes, heart failure, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and osteoarthritis. The scientists say more research is needed to determine whether illnesses may need to be treated one at a time in some instances.

“More than 9 million older adults in the U.S. are being prescribed medications that may be causing them more harm than benefit,” said study co-author Jonathan Lorgunpai, a medical student at the Yale School of Medicine in a statement. “Not only is this potentially harmful for individual patients, it is also very wasteful for our health care system.”

Number of Adults Using ADHD Drugs Reaches New High

The number of adults using the pills rose by more 50 percent between 2008 and 2012, according to a new report, leading to concerns that the trend of over-diagnosing in children is now occurring in adults

The number of adults taking ADHD drugs rose by more 50% between 2008 and 2012, according to a new report from pharmacy management organization Express Scripts.

The report shows that adults taking medications like Adderall, Concerta, and Strattera rose from an estimated 1.7 million in 2008 to 2.6 million in 2012. For young adults, the increase in ADHD-related drug use was even greater, especially among women ages 26 to 34, who experienced an 85% increase in use. Some medical experts believe that ADHD is over-diagnosed in kids, and that trend is now bleeding over to adults.

The authors of the report note that the increased rate of ADHD medication among adult women could be due to the fact that females tend not to display the disruptive behavior symptoms of disorder, but are more inattentive and therefore may be overlooked when they are kids. It could also be attributed to inappropriate use of the drugs, for example, as an appetite suppressants.

The new findings come from an analysis of about 15 million privately insured people under age 65 and a closer look at pharmacy claims of 400,000 people who filled a minimum of one prescription for ADHD treatment during the study period.